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While much of America sighs in relief, if skepticism, as the President continues to declare that no “boots” will be on the ground in our struggle with ISIL, it’s not that simple.

Keeping combat boots off the ground in Iraq and Syria will lengthen the fight, even assuming ISIL can be destroyed, as the president claims.

Why so? Because lack of on-the-scene combatants hinders destroying ISIL. It means that ISIL can shift its mode as well as its location of operations. It can hide, morph, or move. As we think we’ve destroyed it. Think: Whac-a-Mole.

It also means that American ships, planes and personnel must be at risk to carry out the operations. Navy aircraft and cruise missiles are launched from ships, which must operate in the Persian Gulf or Mediterranean Sea. In either puddle, they’re targets. That’s why the Navy sends self-defending carrier strike groups. Air Force aircraft (both bombers and drones) have to operate from somewhere. Turkey? Qatar? Kyrgyzstan? Kazakhstan? (What’s the common denominator of those countries?)

At risk longer. Carrier groups must patrol in potential hostile waters. Forward American air bases are surrounded by Moslem populations. As military operations lengthen, they tend to fall into routines. Hostile agents can detect and exploit those routines to plot action.

The cost—money, people, consumables, capital equipment—goes up the longer the operation. That gets into “ops tempo” and “logistics tails,” topics for other days.

Could the ISIS embroil Syria, Iraq and Iran in decades of sectarian warfare, decimating the radical population of all three states? We can hope. Sadly, even that best-case scenario endangers millions of innocents.

Of course, if George H. W. Bush hadn’t gone wobbly in 1990, we wouldn’t be having these troubles. (He, not his son, is responsible for the mess there.) Saddam Hussein would have been removed then, and the country likely split in three … and we’d have a whole different set of problems.

For the last fifty years, America’s allies have learned that we aren’t dependable. We abandoned the Shah of Iran, after we engineered the coup which brought him to power. We declared victory in Southeast Asia and abandoned South Vietnam.

Russian tanks are showing up in Ukraine. Tanks. You know, those really big military things. Things which your neighborhood revolutionary—even in Europe—is not apt Continue reading →

Merkel’s right: Putin’s “living in his own world,” not “in touch with reality.”

Why are we so afraid of offending him? He’s been no help with Iran. No help with Syria. And we think he’s our friend?

No, he’s trying to re-build the Soviet Union. Ivan Ilyin, a Russian philosopher Putin often quotes, wrote, “The hour will come when Russia will rise from disintegration and humiliation and begin an epoch of new development and greatness.”